Blum-Kulka, Shoshana

ZOHAR KAMPF

Blum-Kulka is Professor Emerita at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, specializing in

pragmatics and discourse analysis. Her pioneer contributions to the fields of translation,
cross-cultural pragmatics, pragmatic development, interlanguage pragmatics, language
education, family discourse, peer discourse, and media discourse assisted in establishing
the methodological and theoretical basis of applied linguistics. The discourse pragmatic
approach, developed in her theoretical and empirical studies, made an important contribution
to the field of linguistic pragmatics, helping to refute claims of the presumably monological
nature of pragmatic theory, and speech act theory in particular (Linnel, 1998).
Shoshana Blum-Kulka was born in 1936 in the city of Cluj, Transylvania (then Romania,
taken over by Hungary in 1940). Following the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944, she
escaped on what is known as the “Kastner train” with 1,683 other Jews. Blum-Kulka arrived
in Israel at the age of 9 and was educated at the Hebrew Reali School of Haifa. She earned
a BA in English Literature and Romance Languages at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem
and a Master’s in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York.
She continued her academic studies back at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, earning
a PhD in Hebrew Linguistics under the supervision of Chaim Rabin in 1974. Prior to
pursuing a full-time career as a scholar, Blum-Kulka ran the Intensive Hebrew Language
Program for Overseas Students at the Hebrew University for 10 years, and was involved
in writing and editing several textbooks of teaching Hebrew as a second language. She is
credited with having introduced new approaches (both communicative and structurally
graded) to the teaching of Hebrew as a second language, which subsequently completely
transformed the way L2 is taught at university level in Israel. She began her academic
career as a lecturer at the Center of Applied Linguistics at the Hebrew University in 1974
and was later invited to join the Department of Communication and the School of Education
at the same university, where she served as professor of communication and education
until her retirement in 2004.
From her early research on speech acts across cultures to her latest research on the
dialogic and intersubjective nature of communication, Blum-Kulka promoted two basic
ideas that establish the range and vision of applied linguistics: language use as social action
and language use as a process of meaning making. Blum-Kulka’s contribution to the field
of applied linguistics in the late 1970s took several forms: her dissertation on linguistic
simplification for language learners, textbooks for teaching Hebrew as L2, articles on
principles and methods of language teaching, pragmatic studies of translation (e.g., 1982)
and lexical simplification (Levenston & Blum-Kulka, 1978).
At the outset of the 1980s Blum-Kulka’s research expanded to cover cross-cultural prag-
matics in addition to the study of pragmatic competence in a second language (interlanguage
pragmatics). The well-known Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP),
headed by Blum-Kulka, Kasper, and House, integrated linguistics, speech act theory, and
politeness theory in demonstrating cross-cultural and situational variation in the perfor-
mance of requests and apologies (Blum-Kulka, Kasper, & House, 1989). This study provided
the theoretical and methodological framework for the empirical study of speech acts across
cultures, adding to the “armchair” or role-play methods used until then—a semi-structured

The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Edited by Carol A. Chapelle.

© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0104
2 blum-kulka, shoshana

questionnaire (the Discourse Completion Test), which became widely popular for the quick
collection of speech act data from large samples. Among the major contributions related
to this project is Blum-Kulka’s finding (1987) that different cultures exhibit diverse scales
for the perception of politeness that do not conform to Brown and Levinson’s equation of
politeness with indirectness. This finding may be viewed as one of the first to challenge
the universal claim of politeness theory.
Concurrently, in the mid-1980s, Blum-Kulka was also involved in studies of natural
discourse, focusing on issues of (mis)understanding (with Weizman, 1988), and cultural
ways of speaking in family discourse. These studies, which focused on the interactive
nature of communication as a process of meaning making, were the basis for formulating
her discourse pragmatic approach during the 1990s (e.g., 1997b). In her studies on family
discourse she explored cross-cultural differences in natural family discourse at dinnertime
between native Israelis, native Americans, and American immigrants in Israel. Blum-Kulka
showed that family dinnertime, at least in the communities studied, share several basic
characteristics related to the nature of the speech event, yet differ deeply in patterns of
sociability and socialization, providing culturally distinct sites for children’s pragmatic
development (1997a). Dinner Talk was a major contribution to the study of pragmatic
socialization in that it devoted close attention to the many-faceted contributions of multiparty,
intergenerational talk for children’s pragmatic development whereas other contemporary
research tended to focus mainly on dyadic mother–child interaction. Further work along
these lines showed the benefits of multiparty talk for pragmatic development across dif-
ferent cultures and genres (see Blum-Kulka & Snow, 2002). Best known from Blum-Kulka’s
work on specific genres are her studies on narratives, in which she developed a three-
dimensional model (telling, tales, and tellers) to account for cultural variability in the
unfolding of stories in conversation (e.g., 1993).
Blum-Kulka’s interest in pragmatic development led her (by the mid-1990s) to the study
of young child–child peer interactions in natural discourse, developing a theoretical view
of peer talk as a “double opportunity space,” which functions concurrently on the plane of
meaning making within childhood culture as a locus for the co-construction of children’s
social world and peer culture, while at the same time affording opportunities for the
development of discursive learning (e.g., 2005). Her studies of natural peer talk of preschool
and preadolescent children demonstrate the cultural co-construction and discursive
affordances for pragmatic development of peer talk in a gamut of genres, including casual
conversation, narratives, explanations, pretend play, and argumentative talk (e.g., Hamo
& Blum-Kulka, 2007).
Blum-Kulka’s broad intellectual interests found further expression in her important
contributions to the field of mediated political discourse. Her pioneer studies on political
interviews (1983), and later on debates and talk shows (2001), made significant contribu-
tions to the contemporary field of broadcast talk. In her studies during the late 1990s and
the 2000s Blum-Kulka integrated methods of conversation analysis, ethnographic observa-
tions, and pragmatic methods and theories, thus defining the methodological tool box used
by scholars of discourse analysis (Tracy & Haspel, 2005).
To conclude, Blum-Kulka is among the first to introduce pragmatics to the field of applied
linguistics, to develop an integrative approach (discursive pragmatics) to the study of
language use, and to apply this approach innovatively and fruitfully to relatively under-
studied areas of interest, such as media discourse, family discourse, and, more recently,
first- and second-language child peer talk.

SEE ALSO: Discourse Analysis and Conversation Analysis; Politeness and Face Research;
Pragmatic Socialization
 blum-kulka, shoshana 3

References

Blum-Kulka, S. (1982). The study of translation in view of new developments in discourse

analysis: Indirect speech acts. Poetics Today, 2(4), 89–95.
Blum-Kulka, S. (1983). The dynamics of political interviews. Text, 3(2), 131–53.
Blum-Kulka, S. (1987). Indirectness and politeness: Same or different? Journal of Pragmatics, 11(2),
145–60.
Blum-Kulka, S. (1993). “You gotta know how to tell a story”: Telling tales and tellers in American
and Israeli narrative events at dinner. Language in Society, 22(3), 361–402.
Blum-Kulka, S. (1997a). Dinner talk: Cultural patterns of sociability and socialization in family
discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Blum-Kulka, S. (1997b). Discourse pragmatics. In T. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as social interaction
(pp. 38–64). London: Sage.
Blum-Kulka, S. (2001). The many faces of “with Meni”: The history and stories of one Israeli
talk show. In A. Tolson (Ed.), The talk show phenomenon: The performance of talk on “trash TV”
(pp. 89–115). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Blum-Kulka, S. (2005). Modes of meaning-making in children’s conversational storytelling. In
J. Thornborrow & J. Coates (Eds.), The sociolinguistics of narrative (pp. 149–71). Amsterdam,
Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Blum-Kulka, S., Kasper, G., & House, J. (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Blum-Kulka, S., & Snow, C. (Eds.). (2002). Talking to adults. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Blum-Kulka, S., & Weizman E. (1988). The inevitability of misunderstandings: Discourse ambi-
guities. Text, 8(3), 219–43.
Hamo, M., & Blum-Kulka, S. (2007). Apprenticeship in conversation and culture: Emerging
sociability in preschool peer talk. In J. Valsiner & A. Rosa (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of
social-cultural psychology (pp. 423–44), Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Levenston, E., & Blum-Kulka, S. (1978). Discourse completion as a technique for studying
lexical features of interlanguage. Working Papers in Bilingualism, 15, 13–21.
Linnel, P. (1998). Approaching dialogue: Talk, interaction and contexts in dialogical perspective.
Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Tracy, K., & Haspel, K. (2005). Language and social interaction: Its institutional identity, intel-
lectual landscape, and discipline-shifting agenda. Journal of Communication, 54(4), 788–816.

Suggested Readings

Blum-Kulka, S., & Snow, C. (2004). The potential of peer talk. Thematic issue of Discourse Studies:
Peer talk and pragmatic development, 6(3), 291–307.
Kasper, G., & Blum-Kulka, S. (Eds.). (1993). Interlanguage pragmatics. Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press.